Three Simple Ways to Ignore Your Kids Lovingly
Try less, avoid the intensive parenting trap, and make you and your kids happier
Ignoring your kids is good. Hear me out. I am ignoring my children as I write this. And lest you think I am just cruising through the carefree days of older kid-dom, during which they become semi-capable and don’t need our constant hovering, I will have you know I’m currently ignoring a 1- and 2-year-old. That, my friends, is a feat hard-earned through years of practice.
To be sure, the ignoring is not perfect. This laptop has been slammed closed and typos entered approximately 79 times by my toddlers, as I am doing the advanced move of ignoring these children while in the same room. That, my friends, is a feat hard-earned by years of practice.
A mom went viral recently for a short video about not playing with her children. She explained her philosophy:
“The reason that I have children who are 4 and 6 who let me sleep in on a Saturday because they just go play—the reason I can go and read a book… that they are able to play independently—is because I just said ‘no’ to them every single time they asked me to play with them for years. And eventually they stopped asking and just went off and played.”
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She anticipates hate comments, as all moms must on the Internet, and hastens to add that she does plenty of other things with her kids — hiking, science experiments, crafts— just not one category of play.
“I established a culture in my house that adults do not play with toys. Adults do not pretend play,” she says.
I’m a fan of this approach, and not just because I am embarrassingly bad at playing Barbies, like to the point that if someone were to post a video of me playing Barbies on the Internet, it would be worse than most of the video that thank God doesn’t exist of my teen and college years.
I’m a fan because it’s good for you and your kids. Sure, I sound like a party-pooper, but what I’m actually doing is creating permission for both my kids and me to make our time together quality over quantity.
My friend Tim Carney, father of six, has written a new book about why modern parenting feels so daunting and unfun. In “Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs To Be,” Carney touches on the idea of doing just what this mom has done.
“Most American parents could benefit from (themselves and their kids) ignoring their children a bit more and trying a bit less hard,” Carney writes.
He talks about the liberation of having a big family, which forces parents to realize they can’t be perfectly present for making every moment perfect.
“This isn’t laziness. It’s sanity. Doing less means the less you do is better…and it makes everyone happier.”
Hovering, the vigilance that gave helicopter parents their name, creates anxiety, exhaustion, dependence, and ultimately bums everyone out. So, how to avoid it?
In Your Home
I said I was ignoring my toddlers in the same room, but I don’t have to be in the same room with them. Baby proof one room reasonably, put a minimal number of toys in there, and let them do their thing. You know your kids. Trust your gut. If they don’t have a propensity for swallowing random objects while you’re around, they probably won’t do it while you’re in the next room. Mine chew on random objects, but do not swallow them. It’s an important distinction and a blessing, though I confess I was mildly worried this morning before I located a marker cap gone missing.
This is a piece of advice I give all parents of a pair of young siblings: Your children need 20-30 minutes of parental ignoring to learn to play with each other. You birthed entire people to be their peers! Let them enjoy that instead of you sometimes! Once I’ve been out of their way for 10 minutes, my toddlers are investigating board books— many titles have perished in this experiment, but it’s a price we must pay—stacking blocks and chewing on the entertainment center veneer without me. (Someone asked me about only children the other day, and I’d argue it’s even more important they learn to play independently, though the learning curve might be longer.)
As for my big kids, they’re regularly told to go to their room and read. This is not a punishment. It’s one of their favorite activities. It doesn’t preclude my reading to them, which I try to do most nights. In the last year, they have written stories, drawn a little Audubon-style guide to local birds, painted Amazon boxes into space ships, put on fashion shows, and handed me a script for a podcast on the history of Barbie. If I’d been around to badly role-play dolls with them, none of this would have happened.
The default setting in our home is that kids provide kid entertainment before resorting to parents or screens*.
*How we avoid screen time is probably its own whole Substack, so I’ll save it for another time.
At the Park or a Party
It’s hard to pick a favorite episode of “Bluey”— my husband’s is “Pass the Parcel,” which #IYKYK— but mine might be “Bike.”
Bluey’s dad, Bandit is always making us parents feel like rubbish, to borrow the Aussie term, by coming up with an endless stream of pretend games, fun competitions, and loopy characters to please his two daughters, Bluey and Bingo. But his best parenting comes in “Bike,” where he does… nothing.
He takes Bluey to the park, where she is struggling to learn to ride, eventually abandoning her bike to mope on a park bench with her dad. Bandit points out that her little sister is also struggling to reach the water fountain (fine, the bubbler, Aussies), and other kids in the park are struggling to climb the monkey bars. Then he sits back and watches them struggle. He barely moves from his reclined position, and every single kid at the park tries, fails, gets frustrated, and tries again, to solve their own problems. It is beautiful.
You can do the same at the park, and you should! Modern playgrounds are Nerfed to within an inch of their lives making your hovering less necessary than ever. Start small. Let them climb something while you’re out of reach. Let them fail, so they learn to succeed.
Another great place to ignore your kids is at a party with other people who have kids. I remember the first time I went to a Super Bowl party and sent my 2-year-old to the basement playroom with two older girls. She came out happy as could be, decked out like Elsa, and mom got to watch football. Win-win.
As Carney puts it, “we need a place to bring our children —and ignore them—while we hang out with other adults." Find or make those places for yourself and let your children run free*.
*With the giant exception of party spaces where there’s a pool or other water hazard because in the hierarchy of risks, that’s the one you should be vigilant about.
With Their School/Social Lives/Chores
I do not have high levels of executive function. I don’t make plans. I can barely keep my own work schedule. Asking me to keep intricate schedules for four other tiny humans on top of that is a recipe for disaster. And my family knows it.
Luckily, I married a man with extremely high executive function, but that doesn’t mean he carries all that mental load, either. We do a couple of things to make it easier for our family to stay on the same page. We limit extracurricular activities (Carney calls it the “Travel Team Trap”). I want the kids to have opportunities to learn new things, but I also want our family to have time together and for them to get enough sleep and free time.
We have a touchscreen Skylight Calendar (not an ad, just a useful tool) that syncs with my Google Calendar, where I plug in their school days, major assignment due dates, and birthday parties. They are color-coded for each kid, and this is the good part— it is partially up to the kid to recognize when upcoming assignments are due or special dates are approaching. Mom will try to be on top of PJ Day at school, but she’s gonna need an assist.
Another thing I need an assist with is playdates. Bad at them! So, we send our kids out in the neighborhood in hopes they will make their own playdates. Depending on the neighborhood, this can be weird. Maybe no one else sends their kids out! It comes with some anxiety, not really about their safety, but that someone will decide they’re not safe and call authorities. But in an attempt to raise them 90s-style, we sent ours out, instructed them to knock on doors and invite other kids out and politely refuse invitations to come inside to play video games. We found it encouraged others to send their kids out, too, and now they run around with the neighborhood kids for a couple hours a week. Our concession to modernity is they have those little Gizmo watches if they need them.
And, finally, I mostly ignore their laundry. They are old enough to switch it from washer to dryer and put it away, so they do. My own mom did so much laundry, so efficiently, that as if by magic, our clothes ended up folded and back in our drawers. I never thought much about it except, in my teen years, to obnoxiously bellow “Moooooom, where’s my soccer uniforrrrrmmmm???” I am so thankful for that now, and am somewhat puzzled by how she pulled it off. I can’t, so we gradually handed off small chores to the kids when they were capable, building skills and (thanks to executive function husband) routine. A big family is a team, and it needs contributions from all the team members. When expectations are reasonable, contributing is meaningful, not burdensome to them.
I hope you have enjoyed my guide to trying less. Parenting is like anything. You can’t do everything perfectly, so you play to your strengths. If your thing is pretend play, go for it! If not, commit to the thing that is and let your kids do some of the things that aren’t without you. In so doing, you give yourself the freedom to enjoy parenting and you give your kids the space to figure out what their strengths are. In our house, that means more joy for everyone, and isn’t that what we’re all looking for? (Now, unleash the hate comments!)
I love it. I wish I would have done as you suggest. My kids are 16 and 12 now, and I think we would all be better off if I had ignored them more when they were younger.
I come from a family of seven siblings - while our parents were involved, most of the time for us as children we were off in the world, reading, playing outside with each other, with friends, or with each others' friends. When not in school, we'd go missing for large parts of the the day (not photo on milk carton missing, but absent from parental observation).
My Child Bride™ and I waited 15 years before having our first child. We did helicopter initially. But we tried to let them learn to do things independently. She's now 22, a college grad, doing her thing. Our second, 3 years younger, just texted me that she and her college apartment crew have just started their road trip from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, enroute for at least 8 hours to Eureka CA to visit our oldest, where they will be camping in the rain for the weekend, then travelling back generally towards our house in the Sierra Nevada foothills for more rain camping, returning to Cal Poly Wednesday, and then she'll catch a bus back here to hang out at home Thursday - Sunday. I think that they picked up on independence.
As to "to borrow the Aussie term" - our oldest was enthralled with The Wiggles at the turn of the century - her first concert was The Wiggles at 2 years old (first concert I've ever been to with a stroller corral). I honestly thought that she would end up with an Aussie accent. She out grew it. But I still have a Wiggles play list in my vehicle (the music is actually quite delightful) so 20-plus years on, I find it easy to slip into Aussie-isms.